Questions

Yes, to read. Every day, with no advertising and no tracking. Free reading has a daily allowance, because a day of reading is meant to end: when it runs out the session closes into your trail map and the feed opens again the next day.

There is one thing you can buy, and only one. A single payment lifts that allowance and helps keep the project running. It is not a subscription, nothing renews, and no content is held back behind it: supporters and everybody else read exactly the same Drift. What that involves.

So your trails work across devices. Drift stores everything on your device first, which is fast, but a trail saved on a laptop would not exist on a phone. An account carries your trails, saved pages and settings between them, and is what makes sharing a trail possible.

An email address and a password. Nothing else is asked for.

No. Nothing is sold, ever. Drift runs no analytics script, sets no cookies of its own, and has no tracker on it. Your trails are readable by you, and by anyone you deliberately send one to. What Drift storessets out the detail, including the one cookie that arrives from Wikimedia when your browser fetches a card's picture, and you can download all of it or delete your account and its contents from inside the app.

There is no advertising either, and no advertising cookie. If that changes, the privacy page is updated first and you are asked before anything from an advertiser loads.

There is one, it just runs on your input. The threads under each card are the steering. Drift also keeps a light record of which broad areas you have been reading, which only affects what turns up when you drift at random rather than choosing, and it can be switched off in settings.

What it does not do is learn what holds your attention and serve more of it silently. The reasoning is on principles.

It is yours to name, keep, export as an image, or delete. A saved trail lives in your account and syncs across your devices. You can send one to a friend inside Drift if you are both there. Nothing is published publicly and there is no feed of other people's trails.

Yes, and that is mainly what it is for. Drift installs to a home screen and runs full screen on iPhone and Android. The steps are on install. It is a web app, so there is no app store and nothing to update.

Not really. Cards are fetched live from Wikipedia or the museum, so drifting needs a connection. Trails you have already saved are stored on your device and stay readable.

Wikipedia and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Drift does not generate text on a card, so the accuracy is Wikipedia's accuracy: good for orientation, worth checking for anything that matters. Every card links to its source. Detail on sources.

Possibly. If so they would be clearly marked and separate from cards, and the privacy page would be updated first, since an ad script sets third-party cookies. What I want to avoid is time spent becoming the number the app is tuned for.

One person. More on about and colophon.

Let me know. Useful things to include:

• What you were doing when it went wrong.
• Phone or laptop, and whether Drift was installed to your home screen.
• What you expected to happen instead.